Casting director urges Keir Starmer to intervene in case of Paata Burchuladze, 71, jailed for seven years after singing at anti-regime demonstrations

The Royal Opera House in London has urged Keir Starmer to intervene in the case of Paata Burchuladze, a world-renowned bass singer who has been imprisoned in Georgia since October on a charge of leading a coup against the country’s authoritarian leader.

The 71-year-old has performed at the Royal Opera House and the Metropolitan Opera House in New York and collaborated with the likes of Luciano Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo and José Carreras. He was arrested after joining a protest outside the presidential palace in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi. Last week he was given a seven-year jail sentence which Burchuladze suggested to the court was equivalent to a life sentence given his age.

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Monday’s ‘make or break’ speech was one of the PM’s best but the signs are that most Labour MPs have already seen enough

• What did Keir Starmer say in ‘last chance’ speech to save his premiership?

• UK politics live – latest updates

Was that it? Reset number … I forget where we’re up to now. Much the same as the last reset. And probably much the same as the next reset. That’s if there is one. The signs are that most Labour MPs think they’ve seen enough. That Keir Starmer has run out of road. He certainly seems to be running out of friends. Down to a few ultra-loyalists. And he can’t even trust those who want him to stay, as they are probably only biding their time until Andy Burnham is in Westminster and can launch a leadership challenge.

There’s a sadness here. Because Monday’s “make or break” speech was one of Starmer’s best. But it was always going to end in heartbreak, because Starmer can’t roll back the last two years. He can’t stop a leadership race that has in effect already started.

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Over his kaleidoscopic career, the great Shakespearean was a stalwart of the RSC, co-founded a ‘rock’n’roll’ theatre company and excelled at Chekhov and Pinter

Michael Pennington was what Richard II – a part he played with great distinction – called a “well-graced actor”. He had a resonant voice, a handsome countenance, a security and ease on stage. But looking back over his career, on his death at the age of 82, I am struck by its astonishing variety.

He co-founded, with Michael Bogdanov, the English Shakespeare Company. He toured the world with one-man shows on Shakespeare and Chekhov. He directed here and abroad and wrote 10 books full of practical wisdom. On top of all that, he was witty and delightful company.

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Criminal groups and state-linked actors appear to be using commercial models to refine and scale up attacks

• Business live – latest updates

In just three months, AI-powered hacking has gone from a nascent problem to an industrial-scale threat, according to a report from Google.

The findings from Google’s threat intelligence group add to an intensifying, global discussion about how the newest AI models are extremely adept at coding – and becoming extremely powerful tools for exploiting vulnerabilities in a broad array of software systems.

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Leaders cannot ignore support for reparations resolution this November, says St Vincent and Grenadines ex-PM

• What are reparations for slavery and colonialism – and will the UK pay?

It is “inconceivable” that reparatory justice from Britain for the transatlantic trade of enslaved Africans will not be “front and centre” of the next Commonwealth leaders’ meeting, the former prime minister of St Vincent and the Grenadines has said.

Ralph Gonsalves was in Jamaica to discuss the next steps of the “alive and growing” movement to advocate for reparations for hundreds of years of chattel slavery.

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Feyenoord sluit komende zondag het seizoen af met een uitwedstrijd bij PEC Zwolle. De kans is heel groot dat Givairo Read en Ayase Ueda hun laatste duel in het shirt van de Rotterdamse club gaan spelen, melden bronnen aan Rijnmond.

Mocht u nou later een ingewikkeld sollicitatiegesprek hebben, of een zakendeal moeten sluiten, of iets moeten beslissen over heel veel geld, of een werknemer moeten ontslaan: dan is het maar fijn dat u op sgool geleerd hep hoe te handelen in stressvolle situaties. Onze eindexamenleerlingen kunnen in de strijd tegen de stress naar een WAND VOL PLANTEN koekeloeren. "Op vier Nederlandse middelbare scholen staat deze weken een muur van planten, om te helpen bij de centrale eindexamens. (...) Uit onderzoek zou blijken dat planten de concentratie en focus verhogen en stress zouden verminderen." Sollicitatiegesprek? WAND VOL PLANTEN! Huis kopen? WAND VOL PLANTEN! Mot in de kroeg? WAND VOL PLANTEN! FIOD over de vloer? WAND VOL PLANTEN! Financieel rotjaar? WAND VOL PLANTEN! Broer een ongeluk gehad? WAND VOL PLANTEN! Examen moeten halen voor werk? WAND VOL PLANTEN! Rechtszaak meemaken? WAND VOL PLANTEN! Auto-ongeluk beleven? WAND VOL PLANTEN! Deadline? WAND VOL PLANTEN! Gezeik met de buren? WAND VOL PLANTEN! Hypotheekgedoe? WAND VOL PLANTEN! Alimentatie? WAND VOL PLANTEN! Verslaafd? WAND VOL PLANTEN! Iemand zwanger gemaakt? WAND VOL PLANTEN! Gepest worden? WAND VOL PLANTEN! Ruzie met de baas? WAND VOL PLANTEN! Vervelende medische uitslag? WAND VOL PLANTEN! Slapeloosheid? WAND VOL PLANTEN! Klant verliezen? WAND VOL PLANTEN! Bedrijf kapot? WAND VOL PLANTEN! Auto kaduuk? WAND VOL PLANTEN! Aandelenkoers ingestort? WAND VOL PLANTEN! Relatiebreuk? WAND VOL PLANTEN! Plant dood? WAND VOL PLANTEN! Wand ingestort? WAND VOL PLANTEN!

RIYAD (ANP/BLOOMBERG) - De wereldwijde oliemarkten verliezen elke week dat de Straat van Hormuz gesloten is 100 miljoen vaten olie. Daardoor wordt het olietekort, dat door de oorlog in het Midden-Oosten al historisch groot is geworden, alleen maar erger. Dat heeft topman Amin Nasser van het Saudische staatsolieconcern Saudi Aramco maandag gezegd.

Dat tekort aan olie wordt momenteel opgevangen doordat bedrijven en overheden hun voorraden aanspreken, terwijl de wereldwijde reserves gevaarlijk laag worden, zei de topman tijdens een bijeenkomst met financiële analisten. Het grootste deel van de extra olieproductiecapaciteit ter wereld bevindt zich in de Perzische Golf en kan daardoor niet worden ingezet om het tekort op te vangen.

Volgens Nasser verhult het aanspreken van voorraden hoe krap de wereldwijde oliemarkt in werkelijkheid is. Hij waarschuwde zondag al dat de oorlog er de afgelopen twee maanden wereldwijd voor heeft gezorgd dat ongeveer 1 miljard vaten olie niet geleverd konden worden.

TENERIFE (ANP) - Maandag vertrekken er toch twee evacuatievluchten vanaf Tenerife naar Eindhoven, meldt een woordvoerder van het ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken op het Spaanse eiland. Eerder leek er maar één vliegtuig met opvarenden van het cruiseschip Hondius te gaan. Op het Nederlandse schip brak de Andesvariant van het hantavirus uit.

Maandag vertrekt eerst een Nederlandse vlucht met 22 mensen die op het cruiseschip werkten. Het gaat om crewleden van zes nationaliteiten, onder wie een Nederlander.

Daarna gaat een door Australië georganiseerde vlucht naar Eindhoven met zes mensen aan boord. Het gaat om Australiërs, een Nieuw-Zeelander en een Brit. Zij worden eerst naar Nederland gebracht en vervolgens opgehaald en naar Australië gevlogen.

Zondag landde een vliegtuig met 26 opvarenden in Eindhoven.

In aanloop naar de eindexamens zagen docenten in het voortgezet onderwijs hoe steeds meer leerlingen examentraining volgden. Iliass El Hadioui, onderwijssocioloog aan de Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam, dacht na over de toenemende populariteit van bijles en wat dit zegt over de onderwijskwaliteit in Nederland. 

An effort to revive and reinvigorate the 2002 Gtk2 GUI programming toolkit is growing and gaining interest… as we predicted would happen a few months ago. The gtk2-ng project is reviving and modernizing Gtk2 version 2, which the GNOME developers declared dead back in 2020. We held off on reporting this for a while to see if the idea would gain some support, and it does seem to winning interest and followers. Reviving a 24-year-old toolkit that reached its official end-of-life six years ago is a retrospective sort of undertaking, and as such, it appeals to some modern-but-nostalgic development projects. Development is hosted on the Git instance of the Devuan project, the systemd-free fork of Debian. (Last year, Devuan announced its support of Xlibre, the X.org fork that aims to re-invigorate X11 development.) However, developer Daemonratte announced the fork in a thread on the forums of the Pale Moon browser: GTK2 revival. Pale Moon, as we described in 2021, is a continuing fork of an early version of Firefox. Back in February, when we covered the news that Debian 14 planned to drop Gtk2, we mentioned that this might provide the impetus for a fork. This isn’t the first such fork, and we mentioned then that the Ardour digital audio workstation we last looked at in 2022 maintains its own internal version called YTK. Daemonratte says that they’ve already incorporated some fixes from that, and also from an earlier fork by stefan11111 which has been inactive for a couple of years. They then outline the current goals: Current status: Making it Y2K38-safe Getting rid of all deprecation warnings Patching it for NetBSD and backporting NetBSD-specific patches Testing it on all kinds of hardware Further modernization without breaking ABI Future plans: Implement touch support and smooth scrolling from Ardour’s ytk without breaking ABI, so Ardour can be compiled against gtk2 again Heavily lobby for its adoption in the BSD and systemdfree Linux world Reimplement GtkMozEmbed for UXP, so this wonderful engine can be used in gtk2 projects Gtk originally stood for GIMP Tool Kit: 30 years ago, when the GIMP image editor made its public début, Gtk was the set of tools GIMP’s authors created to make it easier to write GUI apps in C. Six years later, GTK+ 2.0.0 appeared. The new plus symbol in its name represented a new object-oriented design. When Miguel de Icaza announced the GNOME desktop project in 1997, it adopted Gtk instead of the then-semi-commercial Qt that KDE used. Since then, Gtk has been developed along with GNOME. GIMP development is relatively slow: the team finally released version 3.0 a year ago, and it uses Gtk 3. (Last month, it released version 3.2.4.) Since launch, though, the GNOME project has released 39 numbered versions, and in recent decades Gtk has kept pace with GNOME, not GIMP. The last version of Gtk 2 was GTK+ 2.24.0 in 2012. The GNOME developers officially said it was end-of-life with the release of Gtk 4 in 2020. Gtk2-ng is far from the only project to fork and revive an older version of a project which has since been superseded by newer versions from the original team. One of the obvious ones is the MATE desktop, which Argentinian developer Perberos announced in 2011. Saying that, though, Daemonratte stated: "The ultimate vision of this fork is to keep gtk2 alive for software using it right now and to revive gtk2 versions of […] Gnome2 […]. Yes, I don’t have to do this alone and no, Mate is not an option, because they use gtk3 now." It is very much not alone. We have been covering releases of KDE 3 fork the Trinity desktop environment since version 14.0.11 in 2021. This vulture used KDE 1.x back when it was the state of the Linux art, and for us, KDE 3.x was already too big and complicated. For the KDE project’s 20th anniversary in 2016, Brazilian developer Helio Chissini de Castro modernized KDE 1 so that it would build and run on Fedora 25. We didn’t realize this had become an ongoing effort, but it has. From later in the Gtk-ng thread, we learned about MiDesktop, a continuing project based on Osiris, a modernized Qt 2. ®

BWH Hotels is informing customers about a third-party data breach that gave cybercriminals access to six months' worth of data. The notification email stated that BWH Hotels, which owns the WorldHotels, Best Western Hotels & Resorts, and Sure Hotels brands, identified the intrusion on April 22, but the affected data goes back to October 14, 2025. BWH Hotels CTO Bill Ryan, who penned the notification email, said names, email addresses, telephone numbers, and/or home addresses belonging to "certain guests" were accessed by an unauthorized third party. The intruders also accessed reservation details, such as reservation numbers, dates of stay, and any special requests. It confirmed that the attack targeted one of its "web applications that houses certain guest reservation data." No payment or bank details were involved. The Register asked BWH Hotels whether the intrusion began in October and went undetected until April, or whether a later breach exposed data dating back to October. We also asked if this was related to information we were sent in March about BWH Hotel customer booking data being stolen and used for phishing campaigns. At the time, the company neither confirmed nor denied the information seen by The Register. BWH Hotels did not immediately respond to our request for comment on Monday. "Upon discovering the incident, we immediately took the application offline and revoked the unauthorized access," said Ryan. "We have engaged leading external cybersecurity experts to support our incident response efforts and to assist with the further strengthening of existing safeguards." "We advise guests to be extra vigilant when viewing any unexpected or suspicious communications about hotel stays. If you receive a suspicious communication such as an unexpected email, text, WhatsApp message, or telephone call that asks for payment, codes, logins, or 'verification,' even if they reference a BWH Hotels property or an upcoming reservation, do not engage. Navigate to sites directly rather than clicking links." ®

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

date stamped on slide June 1985

The Hidden Cassettes. “This is going to sound insane, but when I was a kid I found out my dad secretly recorded our phone calls.” (Be sure to read the “What?!” link.)

Corey Robin reviews Sven Beckert's Capitalism: A Global History SL;The Nation

​​De Speld Sport Quote van het weekend.

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